Dungeon 23 and why I stopped, for now

There are so many great dungeons floating around the internet right now. I am not one of those posting pictures each day. I am a few days (okay, weeks) behind on my dungeon. I also missed posting last week. For the few readers I have here I would like to let you know why. This is not an exciting article about the latest big Kickstarter (Cloud Empress anyone?) or the newest edition of one of the most popular beer and pretzels games (Kobolds Ate My Baby!, all hail King Torg!), no this post is about me and i think it might just be a therapeutic romp with my own brain. If you want to read something about those things I’ll be back with something more RPG related soon enough, sometimes you just need to write about your thoughts and feelings, haha.

I am a teacher at my day job, and I don’t think this will be a surprise for my readers, I teach middle level (8th grade specifically) in a way that involves a lot of student choice, namely utilizing their ideas to plan out content and help lead the students with creating projects and using their own interests to come up with community changing opportunities.

I am also a father of five, a dedicated partner, and a student myself taking graduate level courses.

All that said I have a bit of a time crunch in my life. My dungeon 23 journal is sitting right there next to my bed and I am supposed to be opening it and adding a room each night before bed or when I wake up in the morning, but the actual is different from the ideal. I wake early and my day starts with the dogs, then coffee for the partner and I, then cleaning up the kitchen or getting some work accomplished. Before I know it, it is time to shower pack lunches and head out the door.

My school day is a nonstop romp where I hang with kids, listen to their problems and successes, work together with a wonderful team of people each and every day to try to make the world a better place for our students even if it is only for the 6.5 hours out of the day they are with us, I work in a community that has a very low socio-economic status and a high amount of trauma. It is exhausting work and not every day do I return home with the most warm and fuzzy feeling, but the days I do, make all of the time and effort spent worth it.

I love my job, my life, my family, and RPGs (not necessarily in that order) but when it comes to it the time I do get I need to focus on certain things over others, more often than not.

This is only an excuse and I hope that I pick up the journal, which is mer inches away, and get going on my dungeon again, it is a cool setting where I am hoping to steal a bit from of the worlds of Numenera and Cloud Empress, which interestingly enough I think are even more similar than many are talking about, and utilizing the environmental horror aspect to help inspire my monolithic old world wastes dungeon. It is a sci fantasy world maybe even able to plop into one of these games. It is stat-less and as I am want to do, I plan to incorporate tables to help build out the world and rooms. Small descriptions a la ITO style (hopefully keeping to a few bullet points each room.)

If you’re still here, thanks for reading, and know that the introspective halfling will be returning at some point soon (maybe a midweek post) with something more exciting than my life’s woes. I recently received my Trophy Books and want to write about those, Cloud Empress looks wonderful (in case you did not notice from my comments above…), I have been playing in a PBP game that we hope to have a live session for this weekend to finish out a battle we are engaged in. Also I am creating a game for the classroom as my students are working on economics projects currently.

Maybe I will just write when I can, that has seemed to work for me to date. I’m not looking to win any awards or sell millions of books, just passing on information to the greater RPG community as seen from my view, so I will not stress over making deadlines I am not sure I can make, but rather continue to roll out what I can when I can. You all are great, and many thanks! I even was entered into Prismatic Wasteland‘s first annual Bloggies, which was an honor and as the 16th seed I felt pretty good loosing to the overall runner up for the reviews category!

Derek Bizier, the Introspective Halfling Master

PS. Drew touched up my logo for me and I’m working on changing over all of my logos everywhere I am with this improved shinier version of the HH Coin Logo, check it out!